THE INDIA-PAKISTAN TENSION: ISLAMABAD; Pakistan Is Said to Order an End To Support for Militant Groups

Senior officials said today that Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, had ordered the country's military intelligence agency to cut off backing for Islamic militant groups fighting in the disputed territory of Kashmir. They said future support would go only to groups with local roots that are not part of the Islamic holy war movement that has its most notorious expression in Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda.

General Musharraf's move comes at a critical moment in relations between India and Pakistan, when the two nuclear-armed nations have massed forces along their 1,800-mile border and prepared for a possible war over an incident 20 days ago in which five armed men tried to shoot their way into the Indian Parliament in New Delhi.

India has blamed the attack on two Pakistan-based Islamic militant groups that dominate the rebel movement fighting in Kashmir, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, or the Army of the Pure and the Army of Muhammad, both of which have links to Al Qaeda.

Under threat of war, India has demanded that Pakistan shut down the groups, arrest their leaders and hand them over for trial in the Dec. 13 attack in New Delhi, in which 14 people, including the 5 suicide attackers, were killed.

The Pakistani officials said General Musharraf's orders would end the armed activities of the two groups accused in the attack on Parliament, as well as of other Islamic militant groups that have used bases in Pakistan-ruled Kashmir to mount attacks across the Himalayas.

Although Pakistani officials questioned the evidence India had against the two groups, they acknowledged that the groups were responsible for about 70 percent of all attacks in Indian-ruled Kashmir in the last three years.

The officials who outlined General Musharraf's plans said the Pakistani leader had ordered the shutdown of the wing of the military intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., that deals exclusively with the armed groups that Pakistan backs in Kashmir. The officials said that in the future, Pakistan would limit its backing for the ''Kashmir freedom struggle'' to groups with roots in Kashmir, and rely on Kashmiris to conduct military operations.

As an example of groups that would continue to get government backing, officials cited Hizbul Mujahedeen, which dominated the Kashmir insurgency from its beginnings in 1989 until the mid-1990's, but which rapidly lost its primacy as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad took over. The militant groups shifted increasingly to political assassinations, car bombings and attacks on villages that killed large numbers of Kashmiri civilians, mostly Hindus and Sikhs as well as Muslims accused of collaborating with the Indian authorities.

Groups like Hizbul Mujahedeen, the officials said, would get ''moral and political'' support from the government in Islamabad, but not military training and weapons. They would also be required to purge all non-Kashmiri Muslims, including the Arabs and Chechens who have fought in the groups accused of the Parliament attack. In the last two years, Indian military commanders in Kashmir claim to have captured or killed growing numbers of foreign fighters, mostly Arabs. Western intelligence reports have confirmed that many of those fighters were trained by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

''The decision has been made to cut off support to all nonindigenous groups in Kashmir,'' the officials said. They added that General Musharraf believed that the change in policy would ''cause a scaling-down of the freedom struggle, but will not be its end,'' and that he felt that ''lowering the level of insurgency is not too high a price to pay for protecting the country'' against attack by India, whose conventional forces far outnumber Pakistan's.

The Pakistani decision seemed certain to be met with skepticism in India, which has accused Pakistan of breaking previous promises to curb terrorism in Kashmir, and which has said since the Parliament attack that it wants more from General Musharraf than freezing the bank accounts of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, raids on the offices of the groups, and the arrest of their leaders and other activists. India has also implied that it wants all Pakistan-based groups that challenge Indian rule in Kashmir shut down.

Western diplomats who have been in contact with General Musharraf during the crisis described the decision to end the Islamic militant groups' role in the Kashmir fighting as his boldest step yet to defuse the tensions that have gripped the sub-continent in the aftermath of the Parliament attack. Over the last 72 hours, the tensions have begun to ease slightly, with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and other Indian leaders shifting from threats of war toward more modulated statements stressing their preference for a peaceful outcome.

But the diplomats noted that a succession of Pakistani leaders have found that ordering the military intelligence agency to change course, especially when it involves Islamic militant groups, has not always succeeded. The diplomats said that the I.S.I., operating in the shadows, with few controls on its spending, has long been a rogue agency, capable of continuing support for groups that it has formally disavowed, as it did for at least a few weeks after General Musharraf ordered an end to support for the Taliban in September.

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Since then, General Musharraf has appointed a new I.S.I. chief, but even he has acknowledged privately that getting complete control of the agency will take time.

Still, the diplomats said they saw General Musharraf's latest action as a turning point in the crisis, and said he appeared to have settled on the move after telephone calls that President Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made last week to General Musharraf and Mr. Vajpayee in which Mr. Bush urged both leaders to turn toward a negotiated end to the crisis. The diplomats said the American leaders' message to India had been that General Musharraf had started Pakistan on a ''process'' of curbing Islamic militancy that would meet India's demand for an end to terrorist attacks by Pakistan-based groups. But India had also been told, the diplomats said, that the Pakistani leader needed time so as not to be seen to be ''doing India's bidding'' under threat of war.

Indian leaders, the diplomats said, had been reminded of the message General Musharraf has been spreading in Pakistan for many months.

Although he has been careful not to offer concessions over Kashmir, a 50-year-old wound that arouses deep feelings in this nation of 140 million Muslims, he has been telling Pakistanis that the country has to rid itself of the scourge of Islamic militancy and its corollary, terrorism, if it is not to alienate foreign investors and founder in poverty and violence.

On June 5, General Musharraf took his plans to one of the toughest audiences in the country, an annual conference of Pakistan's top Muslim clerics. Saying he wished to ''speak out what is in my mind and heart,'' he said Islam's claim to be ''the most tolerant of faiths'' was mocked by the realities in Pakistan.

''How does the world judge our claim?'' he asked. ''It looks upon us as terrorists. We have been killing each other, and now we want to spread violence and terror abroad. Naturally, the world regards us as terrorists.''

In the speech, the Pakistani leader did not shy away from Kashmir, a topic he became more reluctant to address in the context of Islamic militancy after Sept. 11, when India began demanding that Islamic militant groups fighting in Kashmir become targets in its war on terrorism.

Pakistani officials have said that the June speech was a harbinger of measures Pakistan planned against Islamic militancy, and that the ultimatum by Washington after Sept. 11 -- that General Musharraf abandon support for the Taliban and its shielding of Al Qaeda, or be placed on the list of countries that sponsor terrorism -- accelerated his agenda.

After the country's most powerful Islamic militant groups challenged the decision to side with the United States in Afghanistan and called on their followers to sign up for ''holy war'' against General Musharraf's government, the president arrested several powerful militant clerics, and announced that they would be tried for inciting armed insurrection. He banned the use of mosques for military training, and ordered an end to the use of mosque loudspeakers for urging violence and hatred.

He also announced plans to rein in the 7,000 madrasas, or religious schools, where 700,000 Pakistani youths receive an education that often amounts to little more than a priming for holy war. Pakistani officials today outlined new regulations that would license the schools, require them to teach a broad curriculum and not just the tenets of militant Islam, and forbid them to engage in arms training. The new rules would require all foreign students in the schools -- about 35,000 at present, half of them Arabs -- to get their governments' permission to attend.

Although the earlier steps failed to provoke the widespread unrest some militant groups predicted, aides to General Musharraf said the steps now being readied -- particularly curbs on militant groups fighting in Kashmir -- would come with political risks. Among those, they said, was the enhanced danger of militants' trying to assassinate General Musharraf.

But General Musharraf has offered his own answer. In a speech on Dec. 25, he said the country had followed a path in recent years that had ''undermined Islam to a level that people of the world associate it with illiteracy, backwardness, intolerance, obscurantism and militancy,'' and that the choice for Pakistan now was to make radical changes, or to court disaster.